The Enterprise System Spectator

Monday, July 06, 2015

More Than a Deployment Option: SaaS Is a Business Model

With the increasingly popularity of software as a service (SaaS), enterprise software vendors today cannot afford to be without a cloud strategy. As a result, traditional vendors have introduced various forms of hosted, hybrid, and SaaS deployment options. These co-exist alongside the vendor’s traditional on-premises license model.

But software as a service is more than just another deployment option, another way to consume software. SaaS is a business model. SaaS not only affects the product: it should drive the nature of how the provider does business, from how the product is developed and maintained to how it is sold, implemented, and supported. It should permeate the very culture of the provider’s organization.
How should the business model of a SaaS provider be different from that
of a traditional software vendor? There are at least six aspects.

I'm interested in hearing about best practices, lessons learned, horror stories, and case studies of success or failure.

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